Thread: Prophecy shop email changes

Just a quick update on our decision to no longer process questions / quotes via email:

• We've been going like this for two months thus far.
• Our sales have increased, and our service levels towards customers have improved. We are shipping orders more quickly, and are responding to phone / live chat / email (for tech support and order updates, not sales) more quickly than previously.
• We've received a number of compliments from customers regarding our improved responsiveness, and in particular about the live chat - thus far, we've found it to combine the best of both phone interactions and email interactions.
• The improvements above are directly related to time freed up by not replying to emails. Now, obviously this has cost us something. As far as we can see, the following is taking place:
  
  • A large proportion of the emails we received, where emails where the client found the answer they where looking for and placed an order prior to us replying to the email. (Often a client would ask a question via email, then two minutes later we get an order from them, with a comment on the order saying "ignore my email") Obviously, for these clients, there is no loss in service quality.
  • Many customers where emailing to confirm price levels and stock levels. We've made improvements to the website to make this information more obvious, and have noticed an decrease in the number of customers contacting us via phone / live chat to check this information.
  • Finally, we received a number of quote requests via emails. When we where taking sales requests via email, we noticed that a relatively low percentage of customers who we sent quotes to went on to place orders. Many of these customers where either businesses looking for on-site support that we do not offer, or residential consumers purchasing low end computers - a market in which we are not very price competitive with large retail stores. At this point, all of these customers are contacting us via either live help, calling us, or posting on our forums. We have probably lost some customers who want an email quote, and won't order without one, however we feel confident that our improvements above have vastly outweighed this, as can be seen by our sales.